A common method of discouraging theft from a house or office is to install iron grill window guards and similar devices over windows and doors which cannot be penetrated by a potential thief. These metallic grills and guards cannot be broken as an ordinary window, and therefore provide considerably greater protection against theft. However, the installation of these protections has introduced a new problem in that, while they keep the thief out, they also, in the past, have kept the residents in. This problem has assumed major proportions, especially in homes where there are small children. In the event of a fire, particularly if the fire is in a hallway, or otherwise cuts off the passage to a door leading to the outside, young children, or even adults, may be trapped in a room from which the only exit is a window protected by an iron window guard or similar grill. In this event, the person inside the room can be fatally burned or fatally exposed to smoke inhalation unless a mechanism is available to open the window guard and allow the escape of the entrapped party.
If the escape mechanism is to have any practical value, it must meet all of the following requirements. First, it must keep the thief out. Secondly, the guard must be unopenable from the outside, while at the same time allow the party inside to release the guard and go out through the window if necessary. Finally, the system must be easily operated by a young child. The persons most often trapped in these buildings are young children, and a system which would be workable for an adult might be completely unworkable by a child.
Thus, a workable guard release seemingly has two contradictory requirements. It must first be one that is unopenable from the outside, while it must be easily openable from the inside, for even a child must be able to operate it with tremendous quickness in the case of an emergency. Accordingly, the invention disclosed herein has as its principal advantages the construction of a system which is quickly operable by children and adults from the inside of a house to release a window guard on the outside, while at the same time makes it a difficult task for a thief or other party on the outside to penetrate through the window guard into the house.